I attended the 2016 March on Washington Film Festival panel discussion on racial justice and "What The White Church Must Do" on Sunday, July 17th at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The panel was facilitated by the Rev. Professor Kelly Brown Douglas, author of the recently published book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.
I walked away with some solid amen moments, ways of seeing issues or ideas through a new lens. A few of those follow here:
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Jim Wallis, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners Magazine and author of multiple books on race and racism in the US and in Christianity, discussed how white Christianity is an idolatry that separates white Christians from God.
If we truly believe in Imago Dei - that all humans bear the image of God - yet hold onto our identification as white and the privileges and power that go along with whiteness, then we do not actually believe in Imago Dei.
We therefore believe that only some people bear the image of God, which TOTALLY GOES AGAINST everything the church and the scriptures have taught.
The construct of whiteness argues the opposite of Imago Dei, that non-white races are less-than human (therefore cannot bear the image of God), and therefore through our holding onto whiteness (not identifying our power and privilege and how that power and privilege has worked systematically historically and currently to oppress non-white persons) we have created an idol out of our whiteness and a chasm between us and the Holy.
We cannot be close to God without identifying our whiteness and the privilege and power that comes along with it as an idol that has separated us from God.
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Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, spoke with so much empathy for her white congregants (as most mainline denominations, hers is majority white) and yet pushed them to a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding racial justice in this country.
She said that when it comes to police killings of Black folk, most well-meaning white people don't condone these killings.
We're not cheering on the police when they shoot Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter.
But overall white folks think that these incidents are isolated ones.
When white folks see the police murder a Black man, we don't see another murder in a long history of murders. We see one incident and we talk about it as such and we remember to look at all the facts and we hem and haw over whether or not this person could be at any fault in their own murder.
What we don't see is the system and history that makes these incidents normative.
What we choose not to see is the thousand-year narrative into which these murders fit.
What we choose not to see is the use and abuse of Black bodies throughout this nation's founding and history.
We have so much that we have chosen not to know.
We have unconsciously worked so hard not to see violence against Black bodies and therefore when we do see it, we're shocked at first but overall within hours we're unburdened by its very existence and history.
And Jim Wallis chimed in with a startling statistic: following publicized police killings of Black persons, 75 percent of white folks say this is an isolated incident and 82 percent of Black folks say this is a normal experience in their life.
How are we even to begin to understand Black pain if we have chosen to plug our ears to their stories?
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I absolutely loved when Rev. Delman Coates of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church provided concrete advice for clergy in the white church.
He said that clergy must provide a counter narrative for white Christians.
Piggybacking off of the discussion about how easy it is for white folks to see police killings of Black folks as isolated incidents, Rev. Coates pushed clergy especially to contextualize these killings in the long history of violence against Black bodies.
It is easy to de-contextualize these issues and see each incident as an individual killing. Then we can justify the police's use of violence based on that one situation.
But these incidents are not isolated.
They are not to be seen alone; they must be understood in this country's long history.
The white church and the clergy in the white church must contextualize these incidents so that they are not seen in isolation.
Coates said that, "Black rage is a function of African Americans contextualizing these moments." When African Americans see another Black man shot in the streets for nothing other than being Black, what response other than rage is appropriate?
Coates implores white clergy especially to help provide the counter narrative by contextualizing these moments.
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Rev. Amy Stapleton of the UMC General Commission on Religion and Race brought the entire discussion back to the fundamentals of our faith in a way that I hadn't considered before.
As a United Methodist and raised evangelical, I resonated with her idea that the personalization of our faith is problematic.
I grew up in a church that preached a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, that focused on my individual sins and God's grace for me as an invidual.
I prayed the prayer to liberate my own soul and God saved me. Alone.
Rev. Stapleton pointed out, though, that our liberation cannot be individual. That God calls us to see the gospel and our liberation as communal.
And if our brother and sister are not free, then we also cannot be free.
It is this personalization of Christianity that causes us as white folks to feel offended individually when a person of color or a white ally says something like we're all complicit in the racism of this country.
As white folks, we feel offended because we've been taught by the church and our national ideologies that all aspects of my life are about me.
It's about my sin, my relationship with God, my work ethic, my accomplishments.
And this individualization of the gospel holes us up in our selves and never lets us see that my liberation is intertwined with yours.
That if my Black sister in Christ is not free there's no way that I am free.
Liberation must be communal.
Rev Stapleton also pointed out that we UMC folks love our potlucks, but racial justice cannot just be about the gathering. This conversation has to start with communal white repentance.
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The panel discussion ended with some remarks from Rev. Brown Douglas.
She brought our attention back to Rev. Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in which he writes that lukewarm white folks are more harmful to the movement for racial justice than outright bigots.
And her last words were that "No community should shout more loudly that Black lives matter than the church."
I hope and work that the white church starts shouting it soon.
